You might imagine space to be empty. But the seeming void contains a barely perceptible fog of hydrogen and other neutral atoms. In 2020, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, having passed the orbit of Pluto, measured a proxy for the amount of hydrogen around it. In the area between stars in our galaxy — the “interstellar medium,” or ISM — New Horizons found around 130 hydrogen atoms per liter of space. Source You might imagine space to be empty. But the seeming void contains a barely pe...

I went into the study after a client call to check the status of something running in our homelab. I didn’t have my laptop on me to SSH, so I unplugged the 15-inch LCD from my B&W Power Mac G3 , and connected it to the server. I was typing away on that for a solid ten minutes, before remembering I was also in the middle of something back in the home office nook. So I left the room and went back to it. My main work area has a 27-inch 4K Dell monitor. Not as good pixel density as the 21.5-inc...

As 2026 hurtles towards the holiday season and then on into 2027, I took a moment to canvass opinion from some of y’all as to the shape of this newsletter. As 2026 hurtles towards the holiday season and then on into 2027, I took a moment to canvass opinion from some of y’all as to the shape of this newsletter. As 2026 hurtles towards the holiday season and then on into 2027, I took a moment to canvass opinion from some of y’all as to the shape of this newsletter. As 2026 hurtles...

Sometimes when I read a post, I get the growing feeling that I'm reading the output of an LLM. I can't necessarily define why, although there are the common tells (it's not the em-dashes, it's the load-bearing tapestries). As I do this my desire to read on atrophies, sometimes to the point of revulsion There are tools out there that claim to be able to tell the difference between LLM-written prose and the old-fashioned biological product. I'm wary of them, partly due skeptism about ...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-98432 for the project Linux , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a use-after-kfree where retransmitting a crafted connection request while finishing the handshake of that same connection causes funny things to happen up to and including arbitrary code execution. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming langua...

Have you seen this ? If you haven't, you should. I think everyone needs to. Wealth inequality on a scale this extreme is almost impossible to explain. You have to experience it to understand. Go ahead. Try it out . Where is the top of this graph? Good question. Keep scrolling up. Last time I did this it took me 12 minutes and 51 seconds, but the whole time I had a way out. We get a button on the screen that lets us punch out any time we want: I quit . But do other Americans get an easy...

The apartment is packed up and empty and I'm leaving New York for Durham this Saturday. Just short of my 9th full year here. People, visitors mostly I guess, seem to associate New York with skyscrapers and traffic and concrete. To me New York is the water. Looking out from Astoria Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Fort Totten Park, Orchard Beach, the parks on both sides of the Hudson, (JFK) Boulevard East, Shore Road Park, and the Belt Parkway looking out at Jamaica Bay. Looking out from the ferries...

Configuring an effective, auto-adaptive, multi-agent orchestration by assigning anthropomorphic human traits to agents. Configuring an effective, auto-adaptive, multi-agent orchestration by assigning anthropomorphic human traits to agents.

There will never be a leap second again. At least not for UTC. At the CGPM , they decided the last leap second we'll ever see for UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, happened back at the end of 2016 . Of course they made that decision while I was out on vacation, so I'm just getting this video up now: But what's the CGPM, why does this matter, and why am I excited about it? There will never be a leap second again. At least not for UTC. At the CGPM , they decided the ...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : AI Chat with document (Claude Code, Grok Build, OpenAI Codex) A sidebar where you can ask an AI assistant questions about the open PDF or image. It uses the Claude Code ( CmdAIChatWithClaudeCode ), Grok Build ( CmdAIChatWithGrokBuild ) or OpenAI Codex ( CmdAIChatWithOpenAICodex ) command-line tool you have installed. Open it from the View menu, the AI chat with document using submenu of the right-click menu, or the Ctrl + K comm...

Thanks to Kyle Schiller at Marathon Fusion for conversations and information that informed this essay. All errors are my own. Much of modern civilization is built on top of chemical reactions, either to produce new materials (as in the blast furnace , which converts iron oxide into metallic iron), or to generate energy. Chemical reactions, as we’ve previously noted , work by rearranging how atoms hold their outermost electrons. Combine an atom of sodium and an atom of chlorine, for instanc...

With my kids I’m currently building a little dungeron crawler and we’re trying to learn a bit about game development along the way. However given that we live in the modern times of increasing capabilities we wanted to get a narrator and voice over. But we also wanted it to not sound like everyone’s standard AI voices so I looked into what options there are on the table. After some investigation I narrowed down to using Qwen3-TTS which uses voice embeddings for custom voices. Wi...

Elegance and intelligence can have a surprisingly negative correlation. Intelligent people sometimes produce inelegant solutions because they’re capable of rapidly brute-forcing problems. If I had to remember a hundred names, I would spend time coming up with clever mnemonics. John von Neumann would probably just remember them. There’s a famous von Neumann story where he was asked how far a fly must travel if it kept flying between two cyclists who were approaching each other at some fixed...

The headings in my blog posts, and some pages, have HTML fragments so that each heading can be linked to. I seldom use this feature, most likely because, at present, I don't have a visual affordance to create such links. Occasionally, though, I find myself wanting to link directly to a heading, so I will make sure there is an anchor. One such occasion was yesterday, when I was adding a new section to my categories page that lists all of my “Advent” series of posts. I placed the Advent head...

In this week's big news (though it's only Wednesday), OpenAI announced a proof that the exponential-time hypothesis is false , with a Lean proof . Later Anthropic released their own paper . Ryan O'Donnell  and Shiva Kintali  posted follow-up proofs, smartly focusing on simplicity rather than getting the best bounds. OpenAI will partner with three of my favorite complexity theorists, Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi and Ryan Williams to verify and study the proof. I have not verified...

A lot of software spends its time mapping strings to values. A web server must identify the HTTP method ( GET , POST , …). It must recognize header names. A URL parser must recognize the protocol ( http , https , ftp , …). A compiler must recognize keywords. In C++, the default approach is to put the strings in a std::unordered_map . std :: unordered_map methods = { { "GET" , Method :: GET }, { "POST" , Method :: POST }, { "PUT" , Method :: PUT }, { "...

tl;dr; GitHub’s language bar counts every byte in your repo, including generated docs and test suites. A few lines in .gitattributes tell it what to skip. For my project, that took it from “75% HTML” to roughly 62% Rust and 38% Python, which is what the project really is. You know that colorful bar on every GitHub repo’s page, the one that says what the project is written in ? I just learned you can tell it what to count. On one of my projects, it made a big difference. Why doe...

Andrew “Geeky” Hawkes knows what it takes to bring a new combat aircraft into service. As one of the first-ever Royal Air Force pilots to train and fight on the Eurofighter Typhoon, he helped introduce cutting-edge capabilities and develop tactics for the force. At Shield, he’s known to his colleagues almost exclusively as Geeky, a callsign he earned by being “massively computer literate” and quickly mastering the Typhoon’s technical details. Over time, he’s grown to embrace the ...

Been having some fun with my 404 page. I love discovering little Easter eggs like this on other people's sites. Just visit a random page, like https://kevquirk.com/mjkk Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Been having some fun with my 404 page. I love discovering little Easter eg...

The wonderful DataPhilly meetup community asked me to come give a talk on any topic, and I talked for half an hour on embedding-based retrieval, machine learning model artifacts creation and inference, general versus smaller models, and understanding latency and ONNX conversion tradeoffs. People also had some fantastic questions around what can we embed, tradeoffs in hosting your own models versus API for inference, and whether a model’s data or achitecture is more important. It was especial...

I've written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents - the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents became reliable daily drivers for software engineers. I think we've reached a new inflection point in October 2026, and this time it's for vibe coding computer games . Tree Appreciator Emberwick Battle Drones Pumpkin Farmer, aka Quarter Sun Cove Four times as insulting What happ...

Avoid Public Functions Calling Other Public Functions Oct 29, 2026 A small-scale rule of thumb. This article will land much better with a concrete example, but I am drawing a blank here, so you gotta just blindly trust my say so! When implementing a software module, it’s often a case that you are writing a public function foo , and at least part of what foo does is already handled by another public function bar . The DRY instinct encourages you to call bar() from within foo . ...

What will we do after the Singularity? The standard answer is: “we’ll just hang out”. The infinite vacation, as in the Culture novels. I think this won’t work. “Hanging out” implies: Other people exist. They want to hang out with you. You want to hang out with them. And the post-scarcity, infinite vacation AI utopia undermines all these assumptions. Other people exist The social processes by which people come together and build relationships will disappear...